Pat Tillman Died For Our Sins

'The Tillman Story' may be the best documentary of the year, but Tom Carson wouldn't recommend watching it on July 4

Beats me how you spent your Fourth of July. But whatever you did, count yourself lucky. Because deadlines are deadlines and I generally just put out the flag and get on with my day, I left my better half tapping away on the sexy sword-and-sorcery novel I hope makes us a bundle. (Hey, who says oddballs like us don't share the American Dream?) Her hubby clumped down to the basement to watch a preview copy of The Tillman Story, a documentary due in theaters on August 20.

Doc's subject, in case you can't guess: Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman, who famously passed up a $3.6 million NFL contract renewal eight months after September 11 to become an Army Ranger and then got his head blown off in Afghanistan in April 2004. Doc's effect: wrenching, with admiration for Tillman and for his phenomenal family—these are folks only a fool or a bastard would mess with—bumping up against rage at the powers that be.

As CNN diehards no doubt recall, the brass tried at first to cover up the inconvenient truth that Tillman was killed by friendly fire. That way, they could pin a posthumous medal on him for his most likely imaginary fight with some awfully phantasmal Taliban guerrillas (there's no concrete evidence any were even present) and make him a poster boy for Bush-era jingoism. That role fit the real Tillman, not to mention his clan, about as well as meringue on a T-bone. At his memorial service, which brimmed with sonorous pap from, among other bigwigs, John McCain—"And you will see him again when a loving God reunites us all"—Tillman's kid brother Rich, getting up on the dais with a brew in one paw, spoke truth to pomposity: "He's not with God. He's fucking dead. He's not religious. So thanks for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead."

Reviewer's frame of mind afterward? Oh, kind of untalkative. I mainly just sat on our porch, smoking too much and watching the flag get itself kicked around by the breeze. Since the weather was gorgeous and our lawn was still green, it looked pretty.

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Tillman was born in 1976, the year of America's now totally forgotten—great job, Gerald Ford—bicentennial. Only his parents' professions prevent them from qualifying as bohemian: Pat senior's a lawyer, mom Mary (or "Dannie") a teacher who's found other work since her eldest son's death. But their idea of the right way to raise kids was tetchy enough that both yesteryear's hippies and today's Tea Partiers can both probably identify, since rock-ribbed decency combined with spirited idiosyncrasy is the version of family values that feels most American across the board. All three Tillman boys grew up fearless and funny. Neighbors report that the whole crew's way with the F-word could have made Shakespeare blush, maybe from jealousy.

If your main visual for Pat Tillman is the square-jawed and lunkheaded photo of him in his Ranger beret, The Tillman Story's footage of him sets you straight. He had eyes as happily wicked as Tobey Maguire's, a grin like Moby Dick telling a joke, a voice that could switch on a dime from Mack truck to roller coaster. Gobbled books as if they were cheeseburgers, too, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to—from sheer omnivore curiosity—the Book of Mormon. Any bookworm who can remember high school knows why brainy jocks are the coolest: They're the only eggheads with nothing to prove.

Wary of how he might be used, Tillman was set on keeping his reasons for enlisting to himself. But that wasn't good enough for the right-wing wind machine. After his death, a muddled but moving interview he'd taped the day after September 11—"A lot of my family has gone and fought in wars, and I really haven't done a damned thing as far as laying myself on the line like that"—was replayed over and over as Pat Tillman's testament. One of the doc's more wince-worthy cable-news snippets has Alan Colmes—you know, the superfluous dweeb Fox News cast as the Democrat Volkswagen to Sean Hannity's GOP Humvee—trying to explain to Hannity and Ann Coulter that their Sgt. Rock was a Noam Chomsky admirer and Iraq-war critic who planned to vote for John Kerry in 2004. Predictably, Sean Humvee and Hyena Barbie both hoot in disbelief, and Colmes goes back to blinking in search of a convenient cave where he can nibble his paycheck.

Despite finding damning room for such sideshows, The Tillman Story never loses sight of the main perps. Because it originated with his superiors and the government he'd taken an oath to defend, the instant cover-up of how Tillman had died was the most unforgivable misrepresentation of all. Counter to normal procedure, his uniform, body armor, and—most shockingly—diary were all burned to destroy any untoward evidence. By the time brother Kevin, then serving in the same Ranger unit, reached the scene just minutes later, Pat's squadmates had already been ordered to lie to him about what had gone down.

Since Kevin was armed at the time, that might have been a reasonable precaution. But back in the States, the same went for the rest of the family, making the firefight's survivors—those interviewed here, anyhow—purely miserable at the deceit. Just as misused were the Navy Seal who gave the eulogy at the memorial service and the other military participants on hand to add pomp and circumstance—fellow warriors who'd obviously have honored Tillman anyway but didn't know they were doing so under false pretenses.

In greater-good mode, the United States Army can be pretty brutal. One bit in the doc that leaves you stupefied is a reprise of the painful images TV viewers saw at the time of a couple of uniformed officers solemnly ascending the steps of Marie Tillman's home with official condolences. Then we learn from the widow herself that in fact they'd been sent to try browbeating her into giving permission for Tillman's photo-op burial at Arlington with full military honors, something he'd formally stated he didn't want.

The original cover story came apart at the seams all of five weeks after Tillman's death. Even after conceding friendly fire was to blame, though, the army still wanted to give him a Silver Star, to Pat senior's disgust: "You don't give a Silver Star for attitude." Pressed hard by the family, the Pentagon grudgingly conducted multiple investigations over several years into not only the facts of Tillman's death but also who'd been responsible for suppressing them, finally producing a midlevel scapegoat: Lieutenant General Philip Kensinger, who lost his third star as a result. But as we're reminded by Special Ops vet and military blogger Stan Goff, the doc's best-informed talking head, Pat Tillman was the most famous enlisted man in the army. It's inconceivable that the buck didn't stop much higher up.

On the uniformed side, the higher-ups include General Stanley McChrystal, who's barely glimpsed here but was then the head of the Joint Special Operations Command and is now enjoying retirement for unrelated (or are they, really?) stains on his brass hat. On the civilian one, I've got a bridge to nowhere to sell you if you think then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, not exactly a spare-me-the-details kind of boss, wasn't in the loop. But even the 2007 congressional hearings that cap off The Tillman Story never laid a glove on Rummy. As you watch a grinning Rumsfeld swap congratulations with his fellow Pentagon witnesses after their testimony—featuring no less than eighty-two variations on "I don't recall"—it's hard not to think of The Godfather.

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No doubt hard-core Bushies and army defenders will attack the doc as biased. And it sure as hell is, but wouldn't you love to see the documentary that takes the government's side on this one? While the filmmakers don't hide their muckraking purposes, two telltale omissions point up their decency. First off, the doc never mentions the conspiracy theory—still floating around in the left-wing blogosphere's margins—that Tillman was killed to prevent his antiwar views from becoming known, with his destroyed diary being the only detail that might make a non-loon wonder a little. And second, even though the shooters involved in his death are presumably identifiable, their names aren't divulged. Just try to imagine Sean Humvee or Hyena Barbie showing similar restraint.

Directed by Amir Bar-Lev, The Tillman Story is also a first-rate job of assembly and juxtaposition. Whenever we think we've gotten a handle on what really happened, a shift in context either worsens the indictment or drops back to revisit Tillman's earlier life and increase the pain of our—by the end, it's collective, believe me—loss. That holds true all the way to the credits, showing us the annual run sponsored by the Pat Tillman Foundation. As more and more runners wearing his old Arizona State number bob into view, the effect goes from mawkish to wondrously moving.

So what should we call Pat Tillman a martyr to? By coincidence, on an earlier tour in Iraq, he and his unit had been peripherally involved in the Bush administration's other big combat-zone con job: the dramatic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, who proved her true mettle when she called bullshit on the propaganda that tried to turn her into a female Rambo combined with Jodie Foster in The Accused. As Tillman's team waited through an inexplicable delay in the rescue's timetable—it turned out the raiders were waiting for the camera crew—another soldier remembers him saying, "This war is just so fuckin' illegal."

That was seven years ago, and he never knew the government's actions after his death would be the micro version of that macro truth. When you base a war on a lie, the rest is probably just habit. Yet those weren't Tillman's last words. Repeated at the top of his lungs, his last words were, "I'm Pat fuckin' Tillman! Why are you shooting at me?" As for me, by the time the missus came out to the porch to nudge me inside to my uneaten dinner, it turned out her hubby had killed most of a bottle of wine. It was too late to phone anyone or even fire up a sparkler. Or do much of anything, really, so I took in the flag and put out the light.

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